A judge has rejected a request from medical marijuana suppliers to bar federal prosecutors from filing charges against them or seizing their property.

U.S. District Judge Saundra Brown Armstrong in Oakland said the medical marijuana collectives had failed to show they would suffer "immediate, irreparable harm" without a court order.

"The court is sensitive to the desires of individuals to use medical marijuana with a doctor's recommendation, as permitted by California law," Armstrong wrote in a 27-page ruling filed this week. "Nonetheless, marijuana remains illegal under federal law, and in Congress' view, it has no medicinal value."

In rejecting the advocates' request for temporary injunctions, the judge also said she doubted they would prevail in lawsuits seeking to halt the Obama administration's campaign to shut down their dispensaries.

Marijuana suppliers, patients and property owners filed lawsuits in each of the state's four federal districts last month, accusing the Justice Department of violating an agreement to leave them alone if they complied with California law.

The department had said "those who possess, grow and distribute medical marijuana in compliance with state law will not be prosecuted nor their property seized," the plaintiffs' lawyers said.

They argued that the federal government had made a binding commitment to follow that policy in settling a suit last year by a marijuana collective in Santa Cruz. The government is breaching that settlement, and breaking the law, with its strategy of going after marijuana dispensaries by threatening to prosecute their landlords, the plaintiffs' lawyers said.

The Justice Department announced its new policy at an October news conference with the four federal prosecutors in California. It has denied it broke any legal commitments to the courts or promises to the public.